Hammer Horror comes to the Hidden Cats Series
The Hidden Cats in… team are clearly Benjamin Button-ing their year. Everything is in reverse. They started the year with Hidden Cats in Christmas, and now, apparently, it’s Halloween with Hidden Cats in Spooky Village. It makes us wonder how they will end their year. Hidden Cats in Valentine’s Day: arriving November 2026.
We respect it. Cats, after all, don’t follow rules. And the Hidden Cats in… team deserve the leeway. It’s no secret that we are big fans of the series, so we’re just happy to be poking the odd mog in giant cityscapes.
We’ve actually had one other Halloween-inflected Hidden Cats game, in the form of Hidden Cats in Spooky Town. But while that one was all trick-or-treat and pumpkins, this one is Hammer Horror. Banshees, Creatures from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein’s Monsters and be-tentacled horrors swarm all over the hidden object scenes. It’s not scary, but the tone is a little darker, inflected with folklore and some Lovecraftian touches.
Rummaging in the Pet Semetary
As with the other games in the series, things start with a giant vista and 200 cats to spot. The giant vista is a Spooky Village, which is an amalgam of real and imagined spooky places. And, as is now traditional, each cat you spot gets coloured in once found, and each building gets equally coloured once all of its cats are discovered.
It’s still a brilliant, foolproof system that – bizarrely – only a few other hidden object or hidden cat games have adopted. It does wonders for mopping up the last few cats. There’s always a panicked moment in other hidden object games where the last few items to spot are the hardest, and the game gives you few visual indicators to help. Hidden Cats in Spooky Village’s paint-by-numbers mechanic narrows the search and removes that panic.
The drawings are as expertly created as usual, with one exception (let’s park that one for a moment). Even when zoomed in, the picture is beautifully crisp, and the image looks as good as a pencil sketch as it does a full-blown painting. There’s so much detail, too, as each character and interaction is its own story.
Purr-Normal Activity
The exception is that, for the first time in the series, we found some cats a little hard to discern from the background. In some occasions, that’s because they are smaller than usual. Hidden Cats in Spooky Village opts to include tiny cats in busy backdrops (trees, cobbles, bricks) and they’re not quite as legible as they are in other games. Special Cats are also dressed up as banshees, Van Helsing and more, but the costumes can go a little overboard. The cats look more like people than felines, which meant we didn’t click on them.
It’s not a big bother, though. The cat-hunting is generally seamless, and the process of elimination that comes with painting the scene is so joyful. You can feel the city becoming more vibrant, apart from a few pockets where you know a cheeky cat is hiding out.
Each special cat unlocks a bonus scene, which is generally smaller and with fewer cats to spot. They’re themed around Witches’ Markets, Scarecrow Fields and Dens of Werewolves. They’re just as good as the bigger vista, but, again, with one exception. I really enjoyed the wide view it takes of the horror genre: Frank’s Inn is a goofy look at what a Hammer Horror bar might look like, while The Crypt is genuinely morbid, with dozens of people likely to die in the next few seconds.
The Blair Witch Paw-Ject
The exception here is that a mechanic from Hidden Cats in Christmas has been dropped for Hidden Cats in Spooky Village. In the Christmas game, these scenes would colour in as you collected cats, just like the city scene. As a family, we thought that it was a net improvement: sure, it makes matters easier, but the game was already easy anyway. And the colouring in of completed segments felt helpful and like a mini reward. Here, it’s gone.
We’ll chalk the two exceptions up as ‘hopes for the future’. They don’t sully the experience, they just stand out as things that didn’t bother us in the past. So many of these Hidden Cats in… games get released in a year that perhaps the team was trying things out. Everything could change in the next one.
For now, we’re just happy that the franchise exists. Hidden Cats in Spooky Village is as good as all the other Hidden Cats in… games, which is to say that it’s very good indeed. Finding cats is as seamless, characterful and cozy as it has always been. Just with added Cthulhu.
Important Links
Hidden Cats in Spooky Village Expands The Cozy Puzzle Series – https://www.thexboxhub.com/hidden-cats-in-spooky-village-expands-the-cozy-puzzle-series/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/hidden-cats-in-spooky-village/9PLDPKB9R048
